Oh man.... this is just too much

What is perhaps most annoying about the current political situation in the United States, and the absolute dearth of anything like good journalism or even reasoned analysis which it has brought about in most of the mainstream media, is that it has completely killed any chance for parody. Laughter is the best medicine, right? Well, it's a lot harder to laugh if you can't concoct some ridiculous notion or concept, and then reassure yourself "Nah, it'll never get that bad". So I thought for a while we could all be safe in laughing at the "Obama for Pope" kind of thing. Too absurd, innit?

Sigh.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/205961

At any rate, this provides the printed evidence that it is sometimes very, very difficult to be charitable to some people.

The English Summer

So this is what things have looked like around here lately:


The flowers are lovely, and everything is green, thanks primarily to weather like this just about once every afternoon:



Grandma and Grandpa's visit went very well. They stayed here for a good while, from before Matt's graduation party, to Sunday morning. So I got the opportunity to cook some more at home, fixing up the lasagne for Matt's party, as well as a good-sized dinner for a belated Father's Day on Thursday, and then ziti for the Independence Day party. Thursday's menu started off with an insalata mista, then for the primi I fixed up tagliatelle alla bolognese, and for secondi, a beef pot roast braised in red wine. For contorni, we had steamed asparagus, and cannoli for dessert. And here's the prep for the sauce:


And the finished sauce:


Also, as you can see, Molly the Kitten has been learning Latin with me.

Back from Rome and Siena

Pictures soon to follow!

In Italia

I'm on vacation. So there.

I've applied

That, as they say, is that. I finally got my head into the game and finished the seminary application, and sent it out this evening. And now God and the good Bishop take charge. Who knows what'll happen?

Curriculum Vitae Futurum

Curriculum Vitae
Full Name: Kenneth Richard Michael Augustus Percival MacAlbion Kirkman (a bit of an exaggeration, but in keeping with the new and exciting field of creative nominology)

DOB: Prid. Id. Maii, Anno Domini Nostri IHS XCI MCMLXXXVII, Ab Urbe Condita MMDCCXL

Likes: Puppies, Latin, palaeography, Latin palaeography, the collecting of stamps, wool socks, and tedious sermonizing on the autoapocolocyntosis of Western civilization.

Dislikes: Broccoli.

Academic History: SUNY Geneseo- TBA. Tentatively, BA in History, with significant readings in topics totally unrelated either to major field or non-major courses taken.

Publications: In progress: Germanic Phonology and Laical/Ecclesiastical Lexical Oppositions in the History of the Word "Lewd"
Past: Discourses of Aurescence: Ornamentation in the Dream of the Rood; Monarchy- Not Tried and Found Wanting, but Found Difficult and Usually Abandoned or Summarily Executed; The Fallacy of Vernacularism- How Bad English Translations Have Impaired the Liturgical Sense of the Vast Majority of Roman Catholics; A Møøse Once Bit My Sister- A Study of Nervous Disorders Induced by Freak Alcine Attacks; The Leek: Friend or Foe?

Conferences
2007: Keynote Speaker at the Society for the Promotion of Anachronistic Behavior. Keynote Address: The Hat- a Lost Art.
2008: Annual meeting of the American Association for Politically Incorrect Perspectives on Ecclesiastical History. Presented paper: Innocent III- the Master of Papal Diplomacy and Guardian of All Christendom. Subsequently expressed desire to the Vatican to lead the cause for sainthood of afore-mentioned pontiff. No response as yet.

Current Occupation: Self-Declared Expert on Every Subject At Hand; Pretensions to academia.

END





See what happens when I'm bored?

Is the honeymoon finally ending?

If anything, Gibbsy seems to be doing the most to help it along. I really don't get this Administration. They said they were going to put politics behind them. They said they were going to be open to new ideas and criticism. So why is it that every time someone comes out and lands a nice hit at the expense of Obama's policies, they send out Gibbs to insult them?

There is one thing this so-called "administration" has done plenty of so far: deal out payback.

I wonder if Cramer and Santinelli are going to be investigated like Joe the Plumber? Rush isn't going to have to wait for very long, Obama has already shown himself to be a failure. Thus far, he has shown himself to be nothing more than an imperious, self-promoting git who has his yes-men dig up dirt on anyone who puts the screws to him. He is a failure in the realm of ideas, and a failure in being anything like a true leader.

Some Lenten reading

Ever since I first heard of it, I have thought very fondly of this discipline. It really ought to be more widely encouraged than it is. This year's reading is Dom Hubert van Zeller's Spirit of Penance, Path to God , and it's quite a read. He puts a lot of thought into everything in there, and it's a topic that's naturally suited to Lent. That it is brief is also a point in its favor, as there is a significant (okay, really significant) amount of reading for classes that I can't blow off. I also have Fr. Adrian Fortescue's The Mass: A Study of the Roman Liturgy, but I'm afraid I won't be able to give the work the time it deserves, with round about 40 books on the Crusades piled on my desk.

One comment for Lent that was monastic in origin, but really has a much wider application to the Christian life, has really stuck in my head lately. I'll paraphrase: "We have all these rules and restrictions put in place, these things that are seen almost as bars on a window- those bars on that window are the gateway to true freedom." Having the courage to admit that we are all in some way broken and ill, and then taking steps to correct it is necessary. We might not like the medicine, but it will cure the sickness, which is what will make us happier in the long run. And after all, we have a good model to follow- who better than the One who bore the punishment due to everyone and was Himself innocent?

La Fin du Carnivale

I really do love this painting:


A picture really is worth a thousand words. The fool is still dressed in his Carnival finery, but his head is down, and he's in a bare, unadorned cell. But from the window, high up in the wall, light streams into the darkened room. Simple, but powerful- and profound.

Erinyes, Ordo, et Chaos

An interesting thought crossed my mind today in thinking about the Oresteia, our current reading in my Athenian history course, and Greek art. J.J. Pollitt, in his classic (ha!) Art and Experience in Classical Greece, points out that one of the major themes in Greek art, science, philosophy, and culture, was the attempt to discover order in, or indeed impose it upon, the seeming chaos of nature, "the flux of physical and psychological experience". One of the major problems seen was the incredibly sudden reversal, metastasis, of the human condition, particularly in such a mutable, fallen world. I don't think, of course, that the Greeks ever had the idea of a fall until it was brought to them, but there is a keen awareness within Greek art and literature that the world is, in a real sense, broken- there is something wrong with it, we have lost something important. And the way in which the Greek attempted to respond to this was by seeking out order in nature, or by imposing order upon nature.

In reading the Oresteia, then, the idea suddenly struck me that much the same impulse is at work. The primal force of the Erinyes, the Furies, drives the action of the play. Klytaimnestra murders Agamemnon in retaliation for the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, Orestes murders Klytaimnestra in retaliation for the murder of Agamemnon his father, and is then driven mad and pursued by the Furies, who hound him for matricide.



But after the trial before Athena, the Erinyes, once the drivers of vengeance, who would by their very nature perpetuate the self-destructive murderous miasmos of the Atreidai, became the Eumenides, the guardians of Athenian law and justice. The move from Erinys to Eumenês, from vengeance to civic justice, seems to fit very well into the motivations of Greek art and experience which Pollitt has posited. Interesting stuff.

Boy, do I hate being right all the time....

Well, maybe I was a little off on the exact tally. The two incidents mentioned in my previous post are pretty evidently indications of a foul wind blowing about lately. And now it seems that fellows who are supposed to be on our team are trying to undermine the authority of the captain. Not cool.
So the Austrian bishops are misbehaving, the Spirit of Vatican II crowd are getting bolder and more strident, the Ecumenists At All Costs are becoming outright intolerant, and the Bitter Pill does a hit piece on Fr. Finigan. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Bad things happen in threes, don't they.....?

So when is the other shoe going to drop? The news about Fr. Maciel and the Legionaries of Christ was a pretty sore blow, and the response from our end hasn't been that great. Which, I suppose, is for entirely valid reasons. Still, we're enduring a drubbing over it, and the issue really does cause grave scandal. The fracas over the lifting of the excommunications is the other big item, but that, in and of itself, is good. The bad part about it was that it quickly fell into the hands of ignorant (not a negative connotation here, but simply meaning "those who do not know") and/or unscrupulous people, who ran with it. It was too good for them to pass up: traditionalist Catholics, Latin Mass-types, and one of their bishops was a Holocaust denier? How could they resist? And how could those who don't know any better be expected to discern what was really at stake, when all the idiot talking heads wanted to do was talk about the Pope un-excommunicating a Holocaust denier as if he approved of the bishop's opinions.



As the dominant mode of thought has become almost exclusively secular (and I still haven't quite been able to date when this occurred, though I think it's fairly defensible that it happened at different times in different places), people's thinking about the Church has become hopelessly muddled. Now naturally that was, to a large extent, always the case with certain Protestant denominations after a few centuries, who didn't know what the Catholic Church teaches and why. But now it looks like the problem has trickled down to Catholics too. We've started to view the Church almost as a club- you pays your money and you gets your salvation. So someone who has been excommunicated has simply been kicked out of the club. It seems to be the tacit assumption that they'll go join on with another religious group, or start their own, and that's that. And more to the point in this case, you can, or should, get kicked out of that club (i.e. excommunicated) if the other members don't like you.

In reality, though, it's much more of a medicinal sanction than a punitive one. It's a shock to the system. The excommunicati are cut off from the life of the Church, in the hopes that this enables them to see the very real consequences of what they have done. That's a bit more difficult with latae sententiae excommunications, I think, but that's also why we have to educate the people in our Church, so they know what's going on, what these things mean. But the intention, and the hope, is always there that the person will come back into the fold, will repent and be reconciled. Sadly, this doesn't always happen, and these days, it seems that some people would rather be wrong about the whole eternal salvation thing than follow rules they don't particularly like or understand.


But the formerly excommunicated Bishop Williamson has committed perhaps the one remaining cardinal secular sin- the denial of the Holocaust. Make no mistake, I think this really is a very serious and extremely scandalous thing to do, and unlike the sophmoric Voltaire-parroting philosophes who sometimes crop up, I feel no compulsion to defend the right of a fool to speak folly without consequence. So what claim do these people have to make about the lifting of the excommunication in order to justify their strenuous objections? Evidently, the lifting of a punishment due to an entirely different offense amounts to an approbation of the particular offense of Holocaust denial that has gotten up the moderns' nose. Well, what else would we have to believe in order for this to make sense? That Pope Benedict, perhaps, shares the same opinion? After all, the press and their drones are all perfectly willing to believe that our Pope was a Nazi, so why not? Of course, there was one Polish fellow who seemed to think Cardinal Ratzinger was all right....
But I imagine most clear-thinking people can see that that's not a very good option. But still there's that lingering idea that the Pope should not have done this. The Pope, they say, has gone too far.

Nonsense. The Pope has done precisely what Christ would have done. The Church is the hospital for sinners, it is precisely where every man, woman, and child needs to be, including Bishop Williamson. He was baptized a Catholic, and though many have forgotten it, this means that he has been blessed with an indelible mark that states that he was claimed by God as His own. He can't be kept out of that hospital for sinners so long as he is willing to obey the laws of that hospital, whatever his views might be. We never seem to be able to keep this in mind, but who did Christ call to Himself? He called Simon Peter, and others like him. The man who told Our Lord that he would never betray Him, only to turn around and deny that he ever knew Him. What would we say to this, from a purely secular mindset? That Peter couldn't be trusted? Quite possibly. That he had betrayed someone to whom he swore loyalty, and therefore was worthy of a right swift kick in the pants? Almost definitely. And what about the people Jesus ate with? Tax collectors (many of whom were probably cheats, though for some reason, I don't think the idea of someone who collects taxes and rips off everybody else gets us as mad as it once might have), adulterers, boors, thieves, the possessed, all sorts of ruffians. And then, of course, there's us. He forgave us, too. Is it really our right to decry the forgiving of one man, when He has already paid the ultimate price and forgiven every one of us for all our sins? It's worth thinking about.

After another long absence....

I'm back again. Yes, you can blame Geneseo's Campus Minister, who reminded me that I do, in fact, have a blog.

The big bit of news lately in ecclesiastical circles has been the lifting of the SSPX excommunications by the Holy Father. That was one of the preconditions Bishop Fellay had laid down for continuing talks with Rome, if I remember correctly, so that was a step forward. In a fit of great timing, though, Bishop Williamson had made some highly ill-advised comments about the Holocaust, which naturally got picked up and disseminated like nobody's business.

With respect to this issue, there seem to be two basic perspectives one could take. One is that of a Catholic or someone well-versed in Church history and protocol to realize that the Church is jam-packed with sinners, and that the lifting of an excommunication does not in any way, shape, or form constitute official approval of one's own bizarre and excessive opinions. (That's my new buzzword for today, 'excessive'). The other perspective, simply, doesn't care. The Pope, they say, has brought a Holocaust and an anti-Semite back into the fold, thereby showing precisely where his loyalties lie. "This is not my Church," will come the tremulous reply, perhaps accompanied by muted strains on the violin. The commitment to ecumenism by that good Pope, the Polish one, is now dead. We are giving in to intolerance. And then the darker mutterings will come out: wasn't this Pope in the Hitler Youth? What if he never repented of the errors of his youth? What if he's just been biding his time, waiting until he's been in control long enough to throw out all attempts at ecumenism, rip up the documents of Vatican II, and bring the Church back into the Middle Ages, when we tortured heretics and beat ourselves over the head with boards?

Color me surprised.

Now, I know it's not the most fair thing that I'm putting words into people's mouths, but c'mon, you know this is exactly the sort of thing we're going to be hearing. It's old, it's tired, it's false, but so's atheism.

What is useful in all of this is that it shows us where the fence is with respect to ecumenism. It's a good movement, and born of noble impulses with important work to do, but along the line we seemed to be losing our depth perception. We can't ultimately "get over" all religious and cultural differences. We shouldn't want to, if by that we mean that we are less than forthright about what we believe or indeed stop believing it. And in some ways, that's the only way to go further with this. We can't just say out of solidarity that we are all Jews, or we are all Protestants, or we are all Muslims like we can say "Ich bin ein Berliner". What is upsetting about this situation, though, is that it's not coming about because we have come to that border, that dividing line, on our own, at the end of a process of study, reflection, prayer, and thought. We're coming to it because the world sucker-punched us.

Humanitates- sed quorum?

One of the things I was happen to learn, upon coming here to Geneseo, was that we had a Humanities curriculum. And generally, that term can connote some very different things. This, however, was a special case. The Humanities sequence at Geneseo was strongly focused on the "great books", the central canon of the Western tradition. Benedicamus Domino! This was the sort of class that interested me. I can remember remarking, however, that this seemed a bit too good to be true. As I learned more about the history of the course, my apprehension mounted somewhat. It has been around for decades now, and hasn't been tampered with to include the homage to the Zeitgeist? Ah, but Et in Arcadia ego....


Debate has flared up on campus several times about it. The emphasis on the Western tradition is problematic, it is said. Why must we teach students about only Western things? What about other traditions? Shouldn't we be teaching students how other cultures think? And what of the Humanities curriculum itself? Several times, complaints from students had been printed that X book was taught too quickly, or that Y topic had not been covered in sufficient depth.

Some of these are entirely valid and proper cultures. That a book was taught to quickly or that this topic wasn't covered enough is easily answered: the student is given, by the Humanities curriculum, the tools he or she needs to successfully find the primary sources in question, and read them in a critical and informed manner so as to gain a greater understanding of the text and its world. Simply, if you didn't get enough Virgil, you know where to find him- go to it. Additionally: Yes, students should learn about other cultures and traditions, by all means. This is a critical part of their education. But the myth persists that this can be done without proper training in one's own culture. This is an error that side makes, even from a practical standpoint. Multiculturalism is such an ingrained modern myth that it is hardly ever challenged. And I think it's a very common phenomenon that students either do not believe they really have a culture, or simply do not reflect on the question and its import. But how, then, are we to understand some tradition not our own when we do not even know the ground we are standing on? This contributes to a sort of intellectual dilettantism, a collection of bits of knowledge, impressions, and quotations from various sources within other cultures that cannot be organized into a meaningful whole because the hermeneutic for doing so is never taught or discussed. In fact, it is frequently assumed not to exist.

I am not unsympathetic to the desire to include "non-Western" components of the general education curriculum; I share it. I believe the mistake, however, lies in placing the burden on the Humanities sequence to make room for it. The simple truth is, however valuable it might be to our academic, economic, political, social, and moral futures to know how, for example, Muslims might think, or Chinese, or inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, the fact remains that those ways of life are not our own. Their philosophy, while bearing affinity to our own, is not ours. More to the point, and in a more practical vein, we are not (presumably) being educated to succeed in a Muslim society or a Chinese society or a society in the Pacific Islands. We live within a Western culture, and by all indications, immigrants into that culture assimilate more to it than it does to them.

I was dismayed, then, to learn of the recent developments in the Humanities curriculum. In the first place, the Task Force solution is highly problematic. Student input into the Task Force is minimal (though I will confess that this is not always a bad thing). What is more irksome is that the Task Force largely conducts its business outside of the mechanisms on campus already in place to provide the most open fora for discussion of such important topics. Efficiency being thicker than wisdom, it would seem, the solution has been adopted to make changes quickly rather than well.

An inclusion of a non-Western component would be a suitable compromise, it seems. 21 credits, however, is excessive. That's essentially a minor. One must also wonder what would happen to the other courses in the General Education curriculum. So that proposal seems like it will, or at least ought to, be DOA.

I will introduce the second proposal by stating that I have a great respect for Dr. Hon as a professor, and have enjoyed his class immensely. But I cannot help but see this as a seriously wrong-headed proposal. Voici les raisons:
1) The first semester: comparing agrarian river valley civilizations and the maritime civilization based on oceanic trade. From the very beginning, the course's overriding assumption does not seem like it would be familiar to students. The chronological method of presentation has much to be said for it in this regard. The problem is that in a few major cases, there were agrarian civilizations which were not particularly rooted in river valleys, and which were also major world players, sometimes linked into oceanic commerce. I speak, of course, of immortal Rome herself.

In fact, we usually hear of "Greco-Roman civilization". This would seem to merely be a composite of the agrarian Roman civilization with the commercial, sea-going Greek civilization. That's not quite the whole story. Greece, strongly commercial and mighty at sea, never quite lost her agrarian roots- this is particularly the case in Sparta. Even at Athens, the organization of the Athenian polity was focused strongly on land. Recall that the basis of their warfare was the hoplite, a distinctly land-based fellow. And even Carthage and the other former Punic colonies were notably more commercial than Greece.

Rome, too, breaks the mold. Thoroughly agrarian and earthy, the Romans nevertheless became masters of the sea, overcoming much more powerful navies and their own fears to make the Mediterranean "Mare Nostrum".

The course's focus, then, of comparing and contrasting agrarian and oceanic civilizations, then, is off-base. Societies did not necessarily progress from agrarian to oceanic, as would be suggested, and the two existed in such close harmony that they formed the most influential civilization to date. And this should also highlight the inherent mistake in classifying a civilization by its economic existence: it is making out the part to be the whole. Rome is more than an economic conglomeration, but a political, legal, artistic, and moral alliance. And so too for every other civilization. No, to begin on such a foot is to risk too much.



The second semester again risks far too much. Here it is not so much a conceptual problem, though, as an organizational and temporal one. It looks, essentially, to cover the Mediaeval and Renaissance periods in Christendom, as well as the contemporaneous events in other countries. This seems a bit too unwieldy. Compressing several centuries of Western history into a semester is bad enough; now we're to give that treatment to the whole world? How will anyone pull anything useful out of that? The Middle Ages alone is too important, vibrant, diverse, and long to be taught in a semester.


The final semester is, in simplest terms, a disaster. Really. This has Maria Lima's claw-marks all over it. A whole semester on "capitalism"? Bollocks. This falls into the same trap as classifying civilizations as if all that mattered was the economy. Only in a much more obvious and detrimental fashion. This blinds students to the obvious facts of the past few centuries. There was a lot more going on in the world than the development of capitalism. This sort of reductionist mindset is only going to hamstring students. It really smacks of forcing the events of history, the literary monuments, the political achievements, and the works of art of centuries into an ideological framework, and that is intellectually and historically unacceptable.

Second Sunday of Advent

And was it ever a cold walk to Mass this morning! Seriously, I thought a saw a couple of these walking up to St. Mary's:


The First Reading of the Mass today is one of the more memorable, especially to those familiar with Händel's Messiah, in which it serves as the first accompagnato.
"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God
Speak ye comfortably unto Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned, for she hath received of the LORD's hand double for her all sins.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: "Prepare ye the way of the LORD! Make straight in the desert a highway for our God!
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.
And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it." Isaiah 40:1-5

It's fascinating to look at all the different threads the Prophet Isaiah is pulling together. From the first, he speaks of God's comfort to the besieged people of Zion. And while this is a season of penance, necessarily so, it is good to be reminded of the love and comfort of our Lord, the rock who saves us. That we are engaged in a battle is potent spiritual imagery: Satan has laid siege to God's city, to His people on Earth. This is the same Israel, mourning in lonely exile, that we hear of in the great Advent hymn "Veni, veni, Emmanuel". We are a people at war with Satan and his minions, and with sin. And how often we fall!

And in thinking of that, I can't help but think of the ride of the Rohirrim. If we were left to ourselves, we couldn't win. The foe is too strong, and we are too weak. Our strength is too far spent. But Isaiah gives his people Israel, both the historical Israelites and the spiritual people of Israel, the Church, the good news: the Lord Himself is coming to lift the siege! The night will be over, and day will come again. And here also is the reminder that the gift of God's mercy and grace is so much greater than our transgressions. And the voice announcing this all is to be John the Baptist, greater than whom none of those born of woman has arisen.

What is spoken of next is the evening out of the physical aspects of the world. Seeing this in a spiritual sense is a valuable exercise. When Isaiah says that the mountains and hills will be made low, could he not be speaking of the mountains and hills of our pride, our imagined self-sufficiency, all the human constructs we have built up against God. The low places are our sins and failings, which the Lord not only forgives, but in response to which He gives us grace to resist them and overcome them in the future. The straightening of the paths can refer to placing us back on the path of righteousness.

And finally, we are told of the coming glory of the Lord and reminded that this is God's promise- it is the word He has spoken. We may take comfort in that the God gave both His word and His Word- indeed, the Word of God is His promise.


Just some reflections. Enjoy the day!

The benefit of monarchy

Luxembourg usually doesn't attract the attention of very many, but the small country has made some serious waves in the past week. Specifically, the Grand Duke, Henri, has refused to sign a law permitting euthanasia and "assisted suicide", a peculiar little Orwellian neologism which doesn't seem to recognize the lexical fact that if someone helps you along, it's a different "-icide" altogether. Voici and also here

And herein lies one of the highly useful functions of a mixed constitution, in this case, a constitutional monarchy. The nastier tendencies and foibles of the demos can be checked by a royal veto. Now, it hasn't said anywhere in these articles that the Grand Duke is opposing from a specifically Catholic stance (I believe he is Catholic, but wikipedia doesn't confirm that), but I don't think that it would be a stretch to say that His Royal Highness does so from moral and religious conviction. Too often, politicians and people in general are willing to roll over and die because "the people" don't agree with them. There's a pretty sick mythology which has the lives of nations in a stranglehold, and that is that whatever the people "want" is right and cannot be questioned. This is foolish.

Luxembourg's PM, Juncker, in the meantime, is holding true to his ominous name. Feeding off of that damn fool mythology I just mentioned, he's now pushing to have the country's constitution changed. It seems more than a little bit antithetical to the very nature of a constitution to alter it on such a whim. Time was, if the executive didn't want to sign something, you griped about it and called him nasty names, and waited for a more amenable fellow to land in office, but you didn't screw around with the system to get your way. There was an understanding between the present and the future, with the folks in the present being wise enough to understand that if they could tinker with the very fabric of their government and tradition on a whim, some people in the future could also do so, and not to good effect.

Bah. They were more civilized in the Middle Ages. With all our wonderful modern science, we haven't learned a thing. We're cleverer savages with much more refined tools.

CHRISTVS REX

There should be no sense now that we are still in Ordinary Time. Today we celebrate the Feast of Jesus Christ Our King, marking the last Sunday in the liturgical year. It is fitting that the year ends on such a note. Having marked His birth, His Passion, His death, and His glorious resurrection, and then His ascension into Heaven, the year of our celebration ends with Christ enthroned in glory and majesty.

"Blessing and honour, and glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever." Rev. 5:13

I apologize in advance, I am writing this post at a few different intervals, and my brain is all over the place. So this is unsystematic and will probably come out quite rambling and nonsensical.

This is certainly one area in which our history plays against us. We instinctively react against a king, much as our fathers the Romans did before us, for all that we enjoy the royal gossip and pageantry of other countries. The man who would be king is a man to be feared, not loved or admired. The idea of one man ruling seems to us to be perverse, unjust, wicked. The ideas of popular sovereignty are so ingrained in us that the government of a sovereign, a monarch, is something we decry. Sadly so. Yet nevertheless, Christ reigns eternally as our High King, through whom all thrones on Earth stand, and before whom all thrones will fall in worship and adoration.

Yup, it's a nice time of the year for a triumphalist Catholic with strongly monarchist tendencies. The Servant of the Servants of God, Pope Pius XI, reminded us beautifully of the imagery and fact of the sovereign kingship of Christ in his encyclical Quas Primas:This same doctrine of the Kingship of Christ which we have found in the Old Testament is even more clearly taught and confirmed in the New. The Archangel, announcing to the Virgin that she should bear a Son, says that "the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end." In fact, we confess this every feast and Sunday when we state He shall come again to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end



How is such a thing important to us today? I mean, certainly the liturgical regalia and ceremonial is all great fun, and spiritually nourishing. It's been a part of Christian thought and imagery since time immemorial. In fact, the Easter sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes is a subtle reference to just such a doctrine. Aside from its literal meaning "praises", the Latin 'laudes' is also the direct term for a royal ceremony, the praises of the king, especially the Carolingian Emperor. I would be content to leave the issue there, but why not go further in this instance? Why is it important that Christ be seen as King?

For one thing, He is. God has granted Him the primacy in all things; He is the firstborn of all creation. The rule is His by right. And God has promised that this is so; at the name of Jesus every knee shall bend, as they would to a king. And so in the completed Heaven, that is Christ's role. What does this mean for us? The thinking here is old, but significant. Earthly governments do not simply exist in a vacuum- every king, every ruler, has his rule and his kingdom from God. This means also that every institution which governs men must in some respect be infused with that spirit. But for a king, a government, to claim that it has a right to exist of its own, that its dignity is its own, is guilty of the same sin as Lucifer, who would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Sounds like a theocracy? Not quite. While I would find it vastly preferable if every human being were safe and secure within Holy Mother Church, that has never been the case in human history. From a purely pragmatic viewpoint, any institution rooted in some transcendent moral principle will last longer than one that does not, so there's that to consider. Our earthly hierarchy is not an atom- God is not dead, but very much alive, and still concerned with the doings of His people. The caelestial hierarchy is the basis of the mundane. This is one area, interestingly enough, in which traditional Chinese thought is quite salient (at least of the Confucian variety) to our own. But the loss of this sense of the rootedness of all just government in the decrees of God is probably one of the reasons we see it abused so much. We spend so much time storing up treasures on Earth; it's no longer about easing the lot of the poor or bettering ourselves morally, mentally, or spiritually. More and more our society chugs along dreaming of the earthly paradise we could only create if . Our world is lovely, even beautiful, and our life is good. But what we make here is not the end. There used to be this ecstatic vision of Heaven. The Beatific Vision was something worth giving everything for. And how few today we're encouraged to seek it. Most of the stuff we encounter in our daily lives bombards us with messages to discourage just such a quest. It wasn't that life was so much more horrible in years gone by; it's that the sense of joy, the reality of eternal life, was so much stronger then.


I wonder in what respects this ties into the shrinking of the imagination. It's a faculty we might hardly exercise in a given day. That's probably why literature, music, and the visual arts have suffered so. It's the here-and-now that concerns us, and with the ratcheting of entertainment, that's ever more the case. I mean, look at what we call what we watch on TV: reality television. TV's not a bad thing in and of itself, and can be quite engrossing and educational. Some shows are possessed of excellent writing or other such characteristics. But when we start considering what happens in that cathode ray tube "real", we're already in a world of problems. Our very outlook starts to become two-dimensional.

Like I said, disjointed and horribly unsystematic post today. Tired, and my mind's racing. Oh well. At least there are purdy pictures to look at?

Populus Dei

In looking through the news on New Advent I came across this article Councilwoman Criticized for Catholic Remarks It's not entirely surprising, and the rhetoric is tired and unoriginal. The one positive bit of news is that the councilperson in question did abstain from voting on the issue, which is to her credit. I wonder, though, how much longer such people will show such restraint. Remember, she considers it an affront to her own dignity, but to that of all "womankind"; one can imagine it wouldn't take very much to nudge her to act against the Church in support of this "womankind".

Well, now that I've started off being oh-so-cheerful today, on to the meat and potatoes! Whatever happened to the concept of the people of God, Israel? What prompted this thought was the lyrics of the Advent hymn "Veni, veni, Emmanuel". The lyrics are as follows:
Veni, O sapientia
Quae hic disponis omnia
Veni, viam prudentiae
Ut doceas et gloriae
R: Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel
Nascetur pro te, Israel

Veni, veni Adonai
Qui populo in Sinai
Legem dedisti vertice
In maiestate gloriae
R.

Veni, o Iesse virgula
Ex hostis tuos ungula
De spectu tuos tartari
Educ et antro barathri
R.

Veni, Clavis Davidica
Regna reclude caelica
Fac iter tutum superum
Et claude vias inferum
R.

Veni, veni, O Oriens
Solare nos adveniens
Noctis depelle nebulas
Dirasque noctis tenebras
R.

Veni, veni, Rex Gentium
Veni, Redemptor omnium
Ut salvas tuos famulos
Peccati sibi conscios
R.

Veni, veni, Emmanuel
Captivum solve Israel!
Qui gemit in exsilio,
Privatus Dei filio!
Gaude, gaude, Emmanuel
Nascetur pro te, Israel.


While I will concede that it is possibly that I simply haven't heard it, I ask: Why don't we talk like this any more? There's a wealth of symbolism in the Church we have simply done away with. The Church as Israel is a theme that really is worth so much exploration, but it seems that references to that are few and far between. Maybe I just haven't been paying attention.

At the same time, we've lost the practice of seeing ourselves as Roman. Not that we are in any geographical or political sense. I can recall that, after the death of John Paul the Great, in one prayer a cardinal (it might have been then-Cardinal Ratzinger, I can't recall now) implored Mary, the protector of the Roman People. St. Patrick once remarked "If you be Christians, then you are Romans."


I'm jus' askin'.

"Judging"

I am uncertain when this particular concept gained the near total enjoyment of people's attention it now possesses. As with many things, the importance and prevalence of the idea of judging could very well be artificially inflated in my current environment. For many reasons, I hope so. Nevertheless, it's something that takes up an inordinate amount of people's time and mental energy.

No one likes someone who nags. And it's with good reason that the person whose favorite activity is wagging their fingers at others finds himself with very few friends, and a veritable horde of enemies. So as far as that goes, I am with today's culture in agreeing that Negative Nancies are no fun.

What seems different, though, is this peculiar horror of "judgment". I also note that spell-check argues against the medial "e" in that word, which, if substandard, was the way I had learned years ago. Why do they change these things on me? I digress. Back to the subject at hand. Some clarification of terms is relevant here. People are never judged in a positive fashion, to the modern mind. I cannot judge Jack Robinson to be a good and upright man, or Abigail Fiddleswick to be a paragon among mothers. It is perhaps peculiar to our pessimistic outlook (an unduly pessimistic one, I think) that any and every judge must not find in the favor of the accused. It isn't that we find it impossible to label someone good or praiseworthy, but that the peculiar faculty of judgment precludes finding a positive result. That might seem like a semantic quibble, but it is instructive.

What are the roots of this phenomenon? My favorite canard, relativism, of course. But it'd be boring if I just harped on that yet again. And besides, in this case, there's another major contributing factor worth investigating, and that's the modern emphasis on feelings rather than facts. We really can't take criticism any more. And I should know, as I'm one to gripe mightily about any criticism of what I do. But in most cases, I do not demand that my critic cease what they are doing, or that they are in the wrong for doing so. Counsel can sometimes be a bitter pill to swallow, but what medicine isn't? We can no longer believe that a prof gave us such a poor grade on a paper. Don't they know how hard we worked? And don't they know what a top-notch student we are? We've been told all our lives that we're special, and we believe it. So when we do fail, there must be some explanation than doesn't consist in "ourselves". We don't want to hear negative things because they conflict with the ways we are taught to think of ourselves. Everyone is wonderful, and the best part of life is getting together and singing about how wonderful we are.

On the face of it, this perspective is rather disturbing. We are cautioned not to judge any people, as, it is solemnly asserted, such is the province of a judgmental person, that is, a knave. Who, then, would be good? Presumably, the person who forms no judgments, the person who holds no particular opinion. I think this is a view held with some fervor, if by a majority. In some respects, it might explain the pathological need to move to the "center" or the "middle" on a given issue or concept. This is not the same as an Aristotelian golden mean or anything like that. More and more, this manifests itself in a categorical rejection of any proposed solution which would stray to either side in a debate. Politics, of course, furnishes us with the most obvious examples of this, but in other fields too, any action which tends towards one side is viewed as "partisan" and "divisive" by some. At the heart of this, I think, is a retreat from a serious engagement with life's issues.

Even those who adhere to the philosophy of the middle at all costs do so inconsistently, though. I daresay they would never tell a battered woman "Well, try and see his side of things." At least I hope they would not. It is ultimately a philosophy of convenience rather than total conviction. So there is evidently some moderation yet in moderation. That is hopeful.

It is much the same with the no-judgment folks. In many cases, what they want is not a wholesale removal of the discriminating faculty, but a highly selective application thereof. They do not want to be judged themselves, and/or they do not want a given group to be judged in a certain way not consonant with their worldview. We are not permitted to say that homosexual marriage is wrong; the other side, however, is free to call the former whatever mean names they please, and disrupt their church services, and harass them on the streets, and rip crosses from their hands and stomp on them. In such cases, the faculty of judgment is not only quite obviously present, but also hyper-stimulated.

In the sphere of exegesis, this gets really tiresome when it comes to the axiom "Judge not lest ye be judged." We are sternly cautioned by the no-judge-um crowd that we cannot call a given act or proposition wrong; to do so would be to judge, which Christ has warned us not to do. Yet this cannot possibly work. For He also warns us sternly to admonish a sinner of his sin. If we do this not, we are held accountable for that person's soul. So using the modern solution to being faced with two seemingly contradictory injunctions, we choose the one that makes us feel better, right? Heh. Or we could try and read it as a consistent whole, without being cherry-pickers. If we are to admonish the sinner, we must be given permission to know whether or not something is sinful. What we are not permitted to do, however, is to pronounce God's judgment on a soul, the final judgment. We can say that it is a sin to steal, or to break any other commandment, and we would be right. We exceed our mandate, however, when we say that a person who has stolen will undoubtedly go to Hell. So the way the entire passage is understood in the modern world is totally off-base.

Accedit hiems

It looks like we'll get a real winter this year. An accumulation of maybe an inch today, although a bit slushy. Tomorrow is supposed to have an accumulation of 1-3 inches, with heavier snowfall in the evening.